Raffi Krikorian

Uber Advanced Technologies Center

Raffi Krikorian is Engineering Lead at Uber’s Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh, PA. He spends most of his time thinking about off-the-wall ways to change computing, transportation, and the world.

Until August 2014, he was Twitter’s VP of Engineering in charge of the Platform – the core infrastructure of Twitter. During his tenure, Platform Engineering was primarily responsible for the scalability, efficiency, reliability, and performance of Twitter, as well as the developer productivity of all software engineers at Twitter. He lead the Twitter’s transition from a Ruby on Rails web site, to a JVM-powered services oriented architecture which currently serves about 250 million monthly active users who send about 500 million tweets daily. He also created and used to chair Twitter’s Architecture Group, the team of senior software engineers in charge of Twitter’s overall technology portfolio as well as ensuring that software got written to the same consistent standards across its entire global development team.

Comments

Bill Warner

07/25/2011 3:34am PDT

Good stuff! You spoke of the superiority of the jvm over less mature runtime environments, but I wonder if you can comment on the merits of clojure or scala or especially java as an agile hacking language. Do you feel that these languages (esp java) help with managing complexity? Do you feel that developer productivity can match up with looser languages like ruby or php?